There exists on the market photographic or video shooting systems that can identify a portrait or landscape mode of a photo position of the shooting devices by means of accelerometers, or gyroscopes or terrestrial magnetic field detector. This is useful in the course of a digital photo or video use since, as opposed to a simple paper printing, the screen itself has an orientation and the user wants to avoid reviewing the images sideways or upside down. This orientation is based on only one axis.
In the context of panoramic photos or videos captured or viewed in real time from a panoramic camera having a wide-angle lens (e.g. fisheye or panomorph), single axis orientation sensors are insufficient because for the image the proportion of the image therefrom stays the same; it is only recognized as being intended to be portrait or landscape. Thus, the width and the height in terms of angular measurement remain the same, although it is customary in panomorph optics for the angular resolution to be increased across an axis).
Although some devices can automatically detect the position of the horizon in a panoramic picture, they do not allow to determine the projection direction when printed on paper or displayed on a screen in a horizontal or vertical direction and to determine a height-width ratio for displaying the picture. This is due to the fact that the captured image is not a portion of a plane defined by the height-width ratio of the device sensor, but rather a portion of a sphere that fits inside or partly on the image sensor.
Moreover, in most cases it is not the whole of the captured environment that is unintelligible because of geometric distortions but only a part thereof, which constitutes the picture to be displayed or printed and for which distortions have to be corrected and perspectives adjusted.